Stumbleupon & Delicious are Really “Delicious”

“Have you ever searched for certain information on the internet but instead of getting things that you actually need, you are arrested by time checking one-by-one irrelevant search results with annoying webpage full of irritating ads that loads sluggishly slow and consuming your precious bandwidth?”

Websites, webpages, webtools, webservices are among my able-to-mention features of the internet. Internet feature developers or more popular being called web developers are those who are utilizing internet networking service to publish their creative ideas or services. Not to forget to mention that tons of small and corporate businesses have also jumped online to seek potential consumers by disseminating their virtual advertisement in every space they could possibly afford to stick their logos and attract the internet users to pay a visit to their homepage. Today, this internet has been a comfortable nest for online ads raising revenue that actually outnumbered the ads of other media. Revenue wise this is very potential, but for content-wise, this is annoying.

Search Engines has a mechanism to find keywords of related queries from certain available tags or scripts hosted by a web page. SEO or Search Engine Optimization, the term used in web developing realm to increase chance of webpages' keywords picked by a search engine to be lined-up in search results are actually a trick to fool search engine users to get what they don't want. This is dark side of Internet.

Now, getting back to my headline, Stumbleupon and delicious, as these tools have been discussed intensively in the class disscussion before, are among the solutions to get rational search results of a query. These two tools are not as smart as the giant search crawlers that we have been using for some years. However, they tend to give solution to the needs of relevant search results and the avoid-me-from-junks searching experiences. Stumbleupon is a discovery engine that works quite similar to search engine, but instead of crawling to zillion tons of websites pages, it crawls within its own database. Is it the same with web directory service? Yes, but No. The good part of this website is the original intention of sharing the webpage link within its own members similar to community link sharing. Each user who has joined the Stumbleupon community has options whether to recommend a website/webpage or not. Later, the website recommended by a user will be rated by visiting hit of the community users happened to visit the page and also by the so called machine learning. Stumbleupon machine learning engine has an ability to learn users personal preference of type of specific information. Later, by having lots of stumble! you will likely get the most relevant information that suits your need.

Firefox users can install this addon from this link https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/138

Delicious is a social bookmarking service. The idea was very creative, which enables internet user to share their favorite webpage/links to other internet users out there. Besides of sharing bookmarks of a web page, the tool also provide hit counter of how many delicious members saved the same web links. This feature is very informative as it gives you the detail of who are the members who saved the link, thus later to search similar type of information, a user can visit the member's delicious page and have a peek of thing that become his/her interest. As in the class task, we are encouraged to visit other classmates Delicious page to see what they have bookmarked so far, have a reflection of how excited you become finding websites that you have never thought that they exist before you browsed your classmates' page.

A hint to make these two services to work at best is to combine them. I would recommend my classmates to signup for an account on both aforementioned websites. Once you have the account, you can install the addons that will really save your time in accessing them. I mostly use stumbleupon to discover the websites, and once I found them good enough, I save them to my delicious page. Remember, that using stumble upon is very effective to find a website, but rarely you will stumble upon the same website twice. So, always bookmark the favorite discoveries before you lost their trace.

I hope this post will give you better experience in browsing the internet.

Best regards,
Rahmat

Smart-Searching The Web

Searching for specific information in the Internet can be a quite an interesting thing to ponder. One could have thought that the subject to search is not available in the net, but on the contrary one could have to really dig through magnanimous list of result entries to choose for the appropriate needs. I bet that the second thought could spun your head.
Google, as the most popular and powerful search engine must not be deleted from your bookmark. Indeed some Web browsers has set this search engine as the default homepage of the browser. Moreover, some of those who are new to the Internet might say "I never opened any other websites beside google. I can find almost everything in that website!" I must admit, when I was first introduced to using Internet in 2000, i thought catcha.com is the website that host every single information that I needed, which later appeared only a search engine portal. Very sad, that the web search service of catcha.com is no longer available today. As I was trying search for information about catcha.com, I found one interesting blog that lists popular search engines in the 90s with screenshots of the front page that could bring us nostalgia. Here is the link.

In order for one to know how to effectively find specific information in the Internet, one should know the feature of web searching. Apart from google being the biggest search engine today, there are other websites that provide searching service. There are three major kind of search service in the Internet; Web Directory Search, Crawler Search engine, and Meta Search Engine.

Directory search portal offers searches for their web directory database, which are mostly has been stored in the portal database and the directory are grouped into categories. Categories are often provided with subcategories, and some of this service providers allows specific tag to make people able to search the subcategories in the directory. This kind of searching will give great advantages for internet users who don't really know how to phrase their search queries. They can just easily surf into directories listed in the portal and find the final list of the relevant links that they need to open. An example of this type of search portal is www.dmoz.org. To get a website listed in the directory, the webmaster needs to submit the url along with the title and the brief description of the of the website. Just try to find some interesting links for Instructional technology. If you manage it right you will get links of website/service with a very helpful short descriptions of the website.

The second major kind of websearch is the meta searching engine. This kind of search engine search for keywords of the websites' meta keyword tag. Meta search is very effective, as one could find exactly what description that the website has. The potential of getting relevant search results can be achieved better. But this kind of search is no longer popular. Most of the websearch analyst say that the meta search is dead even though the service is still available. The best known meta search engine is www.metacrawler.com. Good thing about metacrawler is that besides it tries to find information of a website, it also tries to find the information from today's popular search engines, like google, altavista, yahoo, etc. One can also publish their website google and yahoo to make meta-crawl based engine to be able to find the website's information. It is an interesting way to get your sites recognized by search engines. You can find more interesting information about meta search in the link below.
www.bestsearchers.com
www.ehow.com
www.searchenginewatch.com

The third type of  web search engine is the Crawler Search Engine, which comes as the most popular nowadays. This type of engine is capable to retrieve keywords or phrases from the webpage.  To find the desired information, one only needs to type the keywords, and to narrow down the search, one can use phrases. The search engine will collect information from websites page headers and also dig into the documents within the website. This search type's most popular service today is google.com. Google.com works like a spider that regularly scour the Internet and make a listing of index of every webpage it finds. Good thing about this kind of search is that it the website that had been indexed is regularly examined. The index list of  webpages is always updated by the engine. Webmasters can optimize their websites to get the 'spider' to be more often monitored the website that they administrate by making optimization called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This optimization can make the website to get higher search engine position. Higher search engine position can attract more visits; more visits will attract advertisers; more ads will give you better chance to get extra money from publishing your web. In short, no one would really browse search result page 874, not even search result page 9. You?

Actually there are some other known search service called the sponsored search. The sponsored search is often offered by the search engine to make people or corporates who are eager to get their website more often being reviewed and indexed. The sponsored search is relatively the same with other search engine service, which the difference was that the sponsored search is the premium service offered for those who are willing to pay to get their website link and description 'stickied' on the top first search page result.

Another interesting way to get fast, relevant, bountiful search result is also available in the Internet. It is way more effective than the aforementioned search services. But I might think it is too risky to post here. The search service is rather controversial. Surely, I will someday post and reviewed the service in other time.

Thanks for reading. As always, comments are always appreciated.

Rahmat